Book Image

Modern Time Series Forecasting with Python

By : Manu Joseph
5 (1)
Book Image

Modern Time Series Forecasting with Python

5 (1)
By: Manu Joseph

Overview of this book

We live in a serendipitous era where the explosion in the quantum of data collected and a renewed interest in data-driven techniques such as machine learning (ML), has changed the landscape of analytics, and with it, time series forecasting. This book, filled with industry-tested tips and tricks, takes you beyond commonly used classical statistical methods such as ARIMA and introduces to you the latest techniques from the world of ML. This is a comprehensive guide to analyzing, visualizing, and creating state-of-the-art forecasting systems, complete with common topics such as ML and deep learning (DL) as well as rarely touched-upon topics such as global forecasting models, cross-validation strategies, and forecast metrics. You’ll begin by exploring the basics of data handling, data visualization, and classical statistical methods before moving on to ML and DL models for time series forecasting. This book takes you on a hands-on journey in which you’ll develop state-of-the-art ML (linear regression to gradient-boosted trees) and DL (feed-forward neural networks, LSTMs, and transformers) models on a real-world dataset along with exploring practical topics such as interpretability. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build world-class time series forecasting systems and tackle problems in the real world.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Getting Familiar with Time Series
6
Part 2 – Machine Learning for Time Series
13
Part 3 – Deep Learning for Time Series
20
Part 4 – Mechanics of Forecasting

Acquiring and Processing Time Series Data

In the previous chapter, we learned what a time series is and established a few standard notations and terminologies. Now, let’s switch tracks from theory to practice. In this chapter, we are going to get our hands dirty and start working with data. Although we said time series data is everywhere, we are still yet to get our hands dirty with a few time series datasets. We are going to start working on the dataset we have chosen to work on throughout this book, process it in the right way, and learn about a few techniques for dealing with missing values.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding the time series dataset
  • pandas datetime operations, indexing, and slicing – a refresher
  • Handling missing data
  • Mapping additional information
  • Saving and loading files to disk
  • Handling longer periods of missing data